In the Tula region, 200 kilometers south of Moscow, Seventh-Day
Adventist pastor Pavel Zubkov wanted to rent an auditorium for a
worship service. He was told that the regional government would let
him do so only if he got the consent of the local Russian Orthodox
priest.

Russia's 1993 constitution guarantees religious freedom to all--at
least on paper. But in fact, Russians have less religious freedom
today than when the constitution was adopted. Away from the
scrutiny of the Moscow press, roughly one-fourth of the country's
provinces have adopted flagrantly unconstitutional measures which
restrict the rights of
religious minorities. The rapid spread of such measures, and the
courts' failure to curb them, suggest that Russia is not even trying to
become a state governed by law.

These new provincial laws often purport to regulate "foreign
missionaries," but also apply to citizens who are as Russian as Boris
Yeltsin but belong to minority faiths. An executive order in the Tver
region, northwest of Moscow, denies accreditation to religious
groups which are "structural subunits of foreign religious
organizations located outside the borders of the Russian Federation"-
-language which could easily be interpreted to cover all Roman
Catholics.

Provincial governments often control nearly all venues suitable for
large gatherings, such as cinemas. Increasingly, provinces forbid the
rental of such sites to religious groups. The Udmurt Republic, some
600 kilometers east of Moscow, bars religious activities even in
privately owned institutions of culture, art or sport. The result is to
make second-class citizens of minority religious believers who do not
possess their own pre-revolutionary church buildings.

Another tactic is to create complicated systems of "accreditation." In
the name of regulating foreign-based churches, secular officials have
seized broad powers to impose regulations on foreign and domestic
clergy alike, and even on rank-and-file lay believers. Some of the
new laws define the word "missionary" so broadly as to embrace
virtually any committed member of a religious group which calls on
its adherents to proclaim its teachings publicly--as do all forms of
Christianity. The Udmurt law defines as "missionary activity,"
subject to special regulations, "the dissemination of religious doctrine
among other-believing and non-believing citizens with the goal of
drawing them into religious formations...by various means:
preaching, propaganda and educational work, the organization of
collective worship services, religious rituals and ceremonies,
individual work and other forms of activity." These so-called
"missionaries" must file detailed reports about their beliefs and
activities, and pay fees for "accreditation" to practice what is
supposed to be a constitutional right.

Russian Orthodox believers, however, are often exempted.
Legislation under consideration in the Yaroslavl region, northeast of
Moscow, exempts so-called "traditional religions," defined as those
"historically continuous among a large part of the populace," as
distinct from "sects," which are religious groups with "beliefs
different from the teachings of the traditional religions." A law in the
Sverdlovsk region, in the central Urals, exempts the Orthodox and
five other specifically named confessions, but not the Baptists,
despite
their century-long presence in Russia.

The new laws treat accreditation as a privilege usually valid for only
one year, giving the authorities wide scope to ban activities which are
inconvenient to themselves or their political allies. Often a church's
accreditation can be revoked if it "ignites religious
dissension" or "encourages citizens to refuse to carry out their civic
or family obligations." Such provisions can easily be used against
groups which publicly disagree with Russian traditions such as the
veneration of icons, or which promote monastic life or conscientious
objection to military service. The bill now under consideration in
Yaroslavl would even forbid churches to "violate generally accepted
norms of behavior" or "practice individual or mass religious
'healing'." Believers could thus find themselves in trouble if they
follow the Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues or the ancient
Christian sacrament of unction for the sick.

Compounding these dangers is the reappearance of government
agencies whose mission is to control religious life in the interests of
the state.

The very existence of these bodies violates Russia's 1990 law
abolishing the Soviet-era Council for Religious Affairs and
forbidding the creation of other such organs. But now they are
growing rapidly in the provinces, often led by the same KGB
informers who used to run the Council for Religious Affairs. The
Sverdlovsk region's council is authorized to evaluate a church's
doctrines and its attitudes toward Russian traditions, to gather
information on it from other sources, and to evaluate "the social-
psychological consequences" of its activities.

Ominously, the provinces have shown a clear trend toward
increasing harshness over the last two years. For example, the
'expert councils' to supervise religious life are granted detailed,
formal mandates in this year's Sverdlovsk and Udmurt legislation,
unlike the 1994 measures of Tver and Tula.

Religious freedom is as important for agnostics or atheists as for
believers, perhaps even more so when many are trying to harness a
warped form of Orthodox Christianity as a new "state ideology."

Minorities of every kind--ethnic, cultural, political--will be less secure
if the provinces continue to get away with restricting religious
minorities. If President Yeltsin's appointees in both the judicial and
executive branches take their own constitution seriously, they
will stop ignoring this assault on human rights, and start resisting it.
(END)